Developing Customer Experience Maps

How we create customer experience maps

Understanding your business

We spend time with key stakeholders to identify the key drivers of your business.

Fieldwork

This is followed by a module of user research with customers or service users who use the product or service. We spent time with customers in the environment or context where they use the product or service. We use a range of research tools including observational research, contextual interviews and diaries. We find there is real benefit if members of the client team can join us during the fieldwork.

Analysis

The analysis and synthesis process is a team based activity combining researchers and service designers to ensure that all team members involved in the research participate and feedback their own observations, insights and thoughts. We frameworks such as POINT to help structure the research data:

Problems

Opportunities

Insights

Needs

Themes

The Customer experience map

From the research and analysis we produce the first iteration of the customer journey map. This is a prototype, which will need refining.

Prototype and finalise the customer experience map

It’s important to test and refine the map with customers and service users to ensure it matches their real life experience. We return and spend time with the original research participants to gain feedback before producing the final customer experience or customer journey map.

When developing customer experience maps it very important to remember we are looking at the world from the customers’ perspective. Also that sometimes Clients focus on the touch points which customers interact with. It is equally as important is to look at the whole of the customer journey – from the beginning through to the end (even those points where customers do not interact with the Client’s key touch points). This enables a rich contextual understanding to be built up about the customer experience.

How long does it take to create a customer experience map?

A typical engagement lasts between 6 and 10 weeks. This depends on the complexity of the service we are mapping.

What happens if our service does not exist?

What if I am a start-up or a business that has a new business model or the service idea which doesn’t exist yet – can you help me? Yes – we can. During the research phases we would work with potential customers or potential user service users to map out the service or business model.

What are the final outputs?

Clients receive the customer experience map

A story booklet documenting the key finding and insights from the research